W.B. 74.
I was born in January of 1974.
I knew that bird. I had known it all my life without ever once picking it up. It sat on the end of the second shelf, and when I was little, my mother used to point at it and say, “That one’s you.” I never asked her what she meant. You don’t, when you’re a child. You think there will always be time to ask.
“What’s your name?” I said. It came out all right.
“Jacob. Jacob Reed.”
“Did you pick him out yourself, Jacob?”
“He’s the only one my size.”
I wrote it down. Jacob Reed. Green-winged teal. W.B. 74. 11:02. My pencil went through the paper on the four.
“Hold him with two hands,” I told him. “He’s older than I am.”
He put his other hand under it right away, and he walked off down the sidewalk that way, careful, like a boy carrying a full glass of milk.
I’ll be honest with you. I had a five-dollar bill folded in my jacket pocket, and I thought about it. I thought about it until he turned the corner.
By noon the table was bare except for the extension cords.
I had nineteen lines in my notepad. I was standing there looking at them when Mr. Tucker came across the street.
Leonard Tucker is eighty-four. He worked the lock with Dad for twenty of those thirty-one years and lived across from my sister for thirty more. He had been sitting in a lawn chair in his own front yard all morning with a thermos between his feet, and I had taken him for a man enjoying the sunshine. He came across slow, on his cane, with a mallard hen in the crook of his arm.
“You’re short twenty-eight,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I been in that chair since ten till seven. Get your pencil.”
He gave them to me one at a time, with his eyes half shut, the way he must have once called barge numbers. The Albers boy, a pintail, about seven fifteen. The preacher’s wife, two bluebills for her grandsons. He knew who had taken twenty-six of the twenty-eight, counting the hen under his own arm.
“The other two went with a couple pulling a boat trailer,” he said. “Missouri plates. Bluebills, both. Them you’ll have to let go.”
“I can let two go.”
He looked up the driveway at my sister, who was folding the legs of the card table with her back to us.
“I told her at seven,” he said. “I said, Gail, any decoy show on this river, a fellow would give seventy-five, a hundred dollars for an honest gunning bird like these and never ask who made it. She said she wasn’t running an auction.”
“She told me the same.”
“Well.” He shifted the hen. “A man doesn’t tell a woman who drove his friend to Canton three hundred times how to clean out his basement. I bought the one and I sat down.”
Forty-seven birds at a hundred dollars is forty-seven hundred dollars. I did not say the figure out loud, and neither did he. It wasn’t a fortune. It was just a great deal more than the money in that cigar box.
I walked up the drive. Gail had an envelope with pencil marks on the back, little fence posts in bundles of five.
“Ninety-four dollars on the ducks,” she said, before I could ask. “Forty-seven marks. I kept it separate. I don’t know why.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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